Narrative/story is best seen as a complex expression of simple limitations. We call these the "storyworld rules." In general, the simpler the rules the better the outcome - Sixth Sense is "when you see red, someone is dead." Pleasantville is "color comes with enlightenment." Harry Potter is "there is magic in the world but there is a conspiracy to keep it secret".
> Harry Potter is "there is magic in the world but there is a conspiracy to keep it secret". Would that not be the worldbuilding part, rather than storybuilding? There's very little in the films or the books about opening up to the Muggles, compared to the greater threat of Wizz War Two. Would a better example be "If it's exploring new lows of the human nature, it must be a horcrux"?
"Worldbuilding" is this exercise the fanfic community took on in order to keep from having to write anything. It's the quintessential "writing about writing" masturbatory fling; prior to the advent of Tumblr and LiveJournal, nobody wrote about what they were going to write about, they just fucking wrote it. HERE'S WHY YOU CARE The only reason to build your world is to show it to someone else. Nobody gives a fuck about your script, they give a fuck about your movie. Nobody gives a fuck about your sell sheet, they give a fuck about your game. Nobody gives a fuck about your show bible, they give a fuck about your TV series. And what you will discover is that the minute you start populating your "world" with characters, your characters are going to expose parts of the world you didn't even vaguely think about and utterly ignore the parts of the world you think are crucial. When Tim Kring set out to write Heroes he set out to create the origin story of Peter Petrelli. The problem is, once they got writing they discovered that yet another goddamn boring origin story about a goddamn boring New York Privileged Son becomeing yet another goddamn boring White Superhero was utterly uninspiring and uninteresting. Meanwhile, two characters they intended to kill off Episode 2 - HRG and The Cheerleader - ended up spawning the narrative arc that basically defined the series. Good Will Hunting was supposed to be about a savant secret agent. What we know of the movie was going to be the first ten minutes. Damon and Affleck took their script to William Goldman and he told them that a savant secret agent was the least interesting thing they could write, while a genius growing up a foster kid in the slums had real legs. Here's the thing: The storyworld rules are the same. "Origin story of a superhero" and "shadowy conspiracy that makes superheroes" live in the same storyworld rules. "Savant secret agent who grew up in the slums" and "savant who grew up in the slums" are the same storyworld rules. But as far as the "world building" you get to waste an awful lot of goddamn time on stuff you'll never use once you sit down to write it. Worse? What I've found of every.single.writer I've ever met who believes in "world building?" IF (big if) they actually write something, they're so busy driving their R/C car characters to all the cool places they built in their world they never bother with character development, dialogue, spontaneous choices, any of it. They've got a big dumb empty world with fuckall going on in it. Here's a hundred fucking books in the same "world." When FASA established the "world" in the first two pages of Mechwarrior they established a universe into which more than a dozen different authors could pore a billion words into. Two pages is all it took to establish a stultifying amount of "world". Unfortunately they're all dreck because nobody can revise the world. It all exists in this canned universe where events are inevitable. If you care entirely too much about the world? If you live and breathe Battletech? Maybe you read the books. But if you're a normie who wants a story, the Battletech novels are the wrong ones to read. I can define Harry Potter in one sentence: "There is magic in the world but there is a conspiracy to keep it secret." That defines EVERYTHING that comes after. Voldemort wishes to destroy that conspiracy. The MInistry wishes to preserve it. All the horcrux bullshit and Slytherin and Ravenclaw and Dolores Umbridge and Dementors exist within that world but they are in no way required. They are in no way implied. They are the creativity that is inspired by enough limitations but unstifled by too many. Horcruxes? Rowling pulled those out of her ass for the second-to-last book, at which point they were a Macguffin to subsitute into video games and the like. There is no part of Harry Potter that depends on horcruxes in the slightest. Worldbuilding is bullshit. Tell your friends.
This is honestly why I liked your script for "that story in the San Juan Islands" that you let me read a decade ago, or whenever it was. It just started. Things began happening. I started reading and the "worldbuilding" part evolved around the action. Weird shit made sense on the next page, because of what happened on the previous page. I got rolled up into the story, and the world evolved around the story. Juxtapose that with so many other fledgling writers that fancy themselves "world builder", who spend 30 pages telling the reader how the world works, just to set up the one "clever" scene where the character ties all these weird threads together to solve the problem. BORING. PREDICTABLE.
There was nothing unusual about that script. That's how you do it. There was a "script guru" back in the early '00s who made the argument that every single first draft that had ever been written could improve simply by ditching the first 30 pages. Beginning writers have this urgent need to explain all the cool shit they've thought of and hang up all the bangles and shine all the sparkles and backstory the ever loving fuck out of the poor dumb bastard making $15 to read this thing and write 1000 words on why it sucks and they don't realize that THE AUDIENCE OWES YOU FUCKALL. Then you get into novels and shit is even more brutal: The rule William Goldman, Blake Snyder and Syd Field all used is "you have ten pages to hook your audience." The rule Sol Stein uses is "they're going to pick your book off the shelf, open it, start reading the first page and if you don't have them hooked by the time they flip to page two you lose." Star Wars - the whole fucking thing - is "He fought with your father in the Clone Wars." Someone once wrote JRR Tolkien to ask what lay beyond the mountains of Mordor. He wrote her back to say "madam, if I told you, you would simply ask 'well what lays beyond that?' What is important is that I know what lies beyond the mountains of Mordor, not that you do." There's a five page document that goes with that script. It lays out the next nine movies. It was created at the request of a collaborator. I fuckin' well know that world but nobody else needs to until there's a story happening in it.
There are a lot of authors out there who publicly talk about what they want writing to be, not what writing is. Mr. "sit at the typewriter and bleed" tried out 26 different titles for A Farewell to Arms, finally settling on number 12. There is science to it, and there are methods that make you more successful, but they tend to be unfun. I've beta-tested for Final Draft for like fifteen years now and there was a time when they'd tell you that the "want to be a screenwriter" market is substantially more lucrative than the "screenwriter" market but since that's bad for business, they keep it on the downlow. Multiply by every other creative profession.
You know what this reminds me of? The first time we talked on Hubski. I asked for film recommendations. You mentioned a few that were off the mark, given the constraints of the request. I said "You misunderstand". You waved around just how many awards are in your cupboard and how fuck no you didn't misunderstand. I told you to go fuck yourself, and we haven't spoken for a while. I'm a newbie when it comes to writing. I don't know as much about theory as you do. I offered my point of view for you to confirm or decline, hopefully with an explanation. You went on a rant about worldbuilding as a kind of writing (as opposed to worldbuilding as a way to populate the world with living, breathing things so what you show in your story doesn't feel two-dimensional), and then gave one single paragraph answering the question at hand. I just want to know if this is how my asking something about the craft is gonna go from now on.
Oh, I remember it well - you said I have a question and I said here is an answer and you came back with no I would like a different answer, one that matches my expectations and sensibilities regardless of your expertise to which I said the answer is the answer. The response you got is colored by the fact that you like to play "hi new name no history I'm going to act like I haven't learned anything." The answer is the answer. I didn't misunderstand shit - I still don't. And no - you're not a newbie. That exchange was like six, seven years ago, dude. Six years after my first script I'd written eight and optioned two. I'd had a short film produced, a comic script set up at an indie house and an agent at William Morris. You may be inexperienced but you've long since passed the point where you can claim to be new at this. You may feel like you're new at this but that might be due to your resistance to facts that do not precisely match your presuppositions. If you don't know as much theory as I do by now, it's because you're resistant to learning not because you haven't had time to get exposed to it. So I'll reiterate and restate: "worldbuilding" is not a kind of writing. It's playing with dolls. It's an excuse to not write. You're responding to a post that contains the DNA for no less than 49 seminal animated shorts and it fits on a single sheet of paper. You want to populate the world with living, breathing things? Write a character study. Then burn it. Then do every other character study from that point forth in your head because if you don't have the confidence to walk me through your universe without someone else holding your hand why don't I just read their take instead? Is this how it's gonna go from now on? By your own admission, it's been going this way for seven years. You can't act surprised or indignant.